Toward the Introduction of Google Assistant in Therapy for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders: An Exploratory Study

Despite the growing interest in Intelligent Personal Assistants in many domains, limited studies have explored this technology's usage among persons with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) and its potential for improving their cognitive skills. This paper presents an exploratory study that investigated the use of Google Home featured with Google Assistant in a therapeutic setting. We provided three therapists with two Google Home devices for 21 days, and they were welcome to use it as they liked at their ordinary one-to-one therapy sessions. During the study, we gathered different data: history logs from Google Assistant and semi-structured observations and comments by the specialists through questionnaires, forms, and a group interview. Our findings give a first glimpse of the usage patterns of Google Assistant within the therapy for children with NDD. Furthermore, our results point out the benefits and challenges for both therapists and children while interacting with conversational technology.